Top 5 Reasons Z-Nation Is A Better Show Than The Walking Dead

I’ve been watching a lot of Z-Nation recently. Mostly catching up on season 1 reruns, and I will confess that there are aspects of Z-Nation that I like better than The Walking Dead.

Sure, you have to get over the inherent cheesiness of the production by The Asylum, but over all, I think the story line is better and more likeable. Who’s the Asylum you ask? They are the production house that gave us “Sharknado” and “Pteracuda” and of course “Sharktopus.” If you liked any of those, you’ll like Z-Nation, to whit:

Compressed timeline per episode. Each episode of Z-Nation can stand on its own. Yes, there is continuity between the episodes but if you watch one, then miss a couple and watch another episode, you can follow along with the story line.

They have an active mission. Getting Murphy to California may or may not be a thing in season 2, but as far as season 1 goes, the gang has a mission and everything that they do is to help them, accomplish that mission.

There is a single plotline and it’s a multi-ethnic group. Basically, everyone on the team is going down the same path. Sure, they all have their own backstory, but they are all going along to the same place.

They are mobile. Instead of being holed up in a walled fortress, these guys are travelling, so they are mobile. They actually address things like finding fuel and filling up gas cans, finding food and finding shelter while they move from place to place.

The super cheesy effects and graphics. C’mon, Viagra enhanced zombies are funny. I can just picture this zombie walking along with a raging boner trying to stick it into whatever it can find. OK, maybe that’s going a bit far, but you get what I’m saying. They also had CGI rendered glowing radioactive zombies. It’s cheesy, but funny and given the rest of the production values, this sort of concept fits right in with the story.

DJ Qualls is in this show, and I love that guy. Also, I didn’t really explain it above, but the fact that it’s a multi-ethnic group is a real win for me. Yes, the majority of the cast is white, but there are Latinos and Latinas as well as black men and women and the zombies are multi-ethnic as well.

I feel like on the Walking Dead, it’s only white people with the token not white person. I don’t feel like the cast of TWD is a realistic representation of modern America.

One last differentiator, is that on this show, they actually refer to the zombies as “zombies” or “Zs” and in some cases they refer to the zombies as “puppies and kittens.” So yeah, I think this world as depicted in Z-Nation is better since it is in a universe much more like ours where people are culturally aware of things like Zombies.

The universe depicted in The Walking Dead, does not seem to have had a history or cultural understanding of what a zombie is, which is why they call their zombies by any name other than zombie.